Horace Dediu puts the spotlight on the crazy way Steve Ballmer speaks. One of the first signs of bullshit is when someone can’t talk in plain English.
He reminds me of this chick.

Ars Technica’s headline says, “Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet”
Why the need for the qualifier ‘$200’? Why can’t it not be just a great tablet?

Back on 5 June, Verge posted a story by Chris Ziegler on the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS. It’s fascinating to read about how closely designers and engineers at Apple, Palm and HP are connected.
In light of Microsoft’s Surface Keynote on the 18th of June, this passage caught my eye:

The demos at CES weren’t faked, but large swaths of critical functionality were still missing under the covers. “The emperor had no clothes,” one source told us. Even though Palm had left webOS’s Prima underpinnings in place to save time and effort, there was still a tremendous amount of work to do in order to get the Pre ready to ship, and everyone inside the company knew it. Palm made the controversial decision to prevent any members of the media from touching the phone after CES prior to launch, a move that raised eyebrows and led many to start asking questions about the company’s readiness.

You could easily replace ‘Palm’ and ‘webOS’ in the quote above with ‘Microsoft’ and ‘Windows 8.’ Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land wrote a great piece on the whole hands off aspect of Microsoft’s event too.
Now Microsoft and Palm are two very different companies so the death of one does not mean the death of the other is inevitable. The important take-away from this story is despite the hard work and creativity of talented people, your product can still come up a day late and a dollar short. Microsoft is up against the same Apple snowball Palm/HP was up against, except now that snowball is farther down the hill and it’s much much bigger.
Here’s another metaphor to throw into the mix: Apple has had 5 years to get up to the speed with iOS and the iPhone and the iPad. Apple didn’t have everything at launch in 2007 (like no GPS, no 3G, no video calls, poor camera, no multi-tasking, no third party applications …), but, as John Gruber wrote in Macworld, they kept iterating and iterating and iterating, cause that’s how Apple rolls down the consumer electronics highway. When you looked at them last, they were doing 60 mph in the slow lane, but now they’re way ahead of you, doing 110 mph in the fast lane.
So Microsoft has to sell something great this fall. Doing the speed limit ain’t going to cut it. They need to drop it into 4th gear and slam the accelerator when they hit the highway on-ramp and at least keep up with Apple. In truth though, they really need some hidden NO2 tanks in trunk.
Matt Bucanan wrote a review of the HP TouchPad and these were his final words:

You’re stepping on my dreams, HP. The TouchPad is so close, closer than anything else, to being good. But it’s also very, very far from it.

Microsoft is dangerously close to getting an identical product review with their Surface tablet. They best be sure it’s fully baked.

After howls of protest in the app store from users, Amazon walked back some of the changes it made to Kindle for iPad. Seen above are screenshots from an update Amazon released to the app store last week. The margins surrounding the text that had been eviscerated in the name of readability have been somewhat restored. However, the new, intrusive toolbar interface remains. The user reviews that the previous update had gotten are doubtless behind the changes, showing that companies do indeed respond to heavily negative feedback from customers.
In reading those customer reviews, there is nary a review that praised the narrow margins of last month’s update. So Amazon changed it. But there were also hardly any reviews that were critical of the toolbar, so Amazon left it as is. Make no mistake, the current toolbar is a downgrade compared to the previous iteration, but it was saved because the new margins were so atrocious that users completely missed the toolbar. Mediocrity is invisible when it stands next to hideousness. Next, Amazon is going to have to figure out how to keep the app from crashing.

From The Wall Street Journal (via parislemon):

Best Buy Co. is testing a new turnaround strategy: making its cavernous electronics emporiums look more like Apple Inc.’s sleek retail outlets.

The heart of a test store near Best Buy’s headquarters here is a Solution Central help desk, rimmed with chairs and manned by the company’s black-tied Geek Squad. It strongly resembles the Genius Bar at Apple’s stores.

Reminds me of those kits that turn a Pontiac Fiero into a Lamborghini.

Beautiful animation of the Evolution of the Formula One Car:

via FlowingData

Great advice from Stu Maschwitz (via Matt Mullenweg):

TVs are designed to do one thing above all: sell. To do so, they must fight for attention on brightly-lit showroom floors. Manufacturers accomplish this in much the same way that transvestite hookers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district do–by showing you everything they’ve got, turned up to eleven. You want brightness? We’ll scald your retinas. You want sharpness? We’ll draw a black outline around everything for you. Like bright colors? We’ll find them even in Casablanca. Oh, and since you associate “yellowing” with age and decay, we’ll also make the image as blue as a retiree’s bouffant on Miami beach.

Yes, yes, LCD displays have come a long way from the early days in comparison to plasma displays, but a lot of what Mr. Maschwitz says validates a lot of what I’ve already known about television optimization. And he is a filmmaker, so I’m going go ahead and take his advice and make the necessary adjustments on my LG television. Something tells me he might know a bit more about this shit than me. Just a hunch.

Sit down, relax and be brilliant.
This is what Cary Grant’s character’s wife say to him after he spaces out and acts like the absent-minded scientist he is in the movie Monkey Business.
Why doesn’t my wife say that to me when I space out?

The whole vanity license plate thing 98% of the population in Los Angeles partakes in still perplexes me.

Last Friday Michael Sippey released a statement from Twitter, explaining how they’re reigning in their API and how developers can use it:

These efforts highlight the increasing importance of us providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools. Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” That guidance continues to apply as much as ever today. Related to that, we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

One of the bigger websites affected by this move was LinkedIn, where you will no longer see tweets showing up in the activity stream on your homepage.
Some developers reacted by resurrecting ideas for a decentralized Twitter.
So rage-against-the-machine. I love it. You gotta take the powah back! C’mon, C’MON!!!
Pardon me if I come across as a bit abrasive, but while Twitter’s move might throw a monkey wrench in some developers’ plans, can’t Twitter do whatever the fuck it pleases? Maybe, because, well, it’s their product?
These calls to create a decentralized, Twitter-like platform are funny. Services/platforms like Twitter (or Facebook or LinkedIn or AIM) rise to prominence because of people with vision. Now maybe some of these people who are proposing this new decentralized platform have that vision, but I’m not holding my breath.
Platforms, even decentralized ones require money and resources. “Free and open” platforms are rarely free and open. Just ask anyone who gets paid to develop for PHP or Red Hat Linux.
So, Twitter’s move. Bold? Douchey? Yes, but it’s their prerogative.

Vanity Fair has a sneak peak (via DF) of the new article on ‘Microsoft’s Lost Decade’. The next 5-10 years are not going to be a fun time for Microsoft fans. Check out Horace Dediu’s charts of Windows lead over Macs steadily deteriorating since it’s peak in 2004.
This statistic from the VF article slapped me in the face pretty hard:

Today, a single Apple product–the iPhone–generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.

As MG Siegler noted, there’s a lot of smoke around the supposed iPad ‘mini’. Things are only going to get harder for Microsoft as it gets up to speed and merges onto the tablet highway. I have plenty of popcorn in my cabinet. This is going to be a fun show.

I pass this sign often. It’s one of the best ads I’ve ever seen.